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Managing Batch Jobs for Several Time Zones?
sporty asks: "I have one machine, a unix box, that serves many time zones at once. Because of this, everything is stored in GMT. Even the system clock is set relative to GMT. The problem is determining when midnite is. I need to run certain jobs, via cron or similar, so that something runs at midnite in that timezone. Anyone have this situation before?"
One unix box. Multiple timezones. Evidently a different script needs to be run for each timezone, since otherwise you'd just run your script every half hour on the half hour...
Why not set up a set of groups with defined IDs (say maybe 1000 - 1047) for each timezone. Allocate users in the appropriate timezone to those groups
Run a master script every hour (or half hour) which su's to a dummy member of that group and runs some script. you get some protection from accidentally breaking things by running as root.
Care to tell us exactly what the obvious solutions don't do? what you're trying to do maybe?
/* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }